Although finding your car has been damaged in a shopping car park bump can be infuriating, if you find that its mostly paint transfer, you may be in luck. This is because its relatively easy to remove yourself with basic detailing products.
As you’ll see in this article, we’ve been quite unfortunate over the years and have had multiple people bump their car into ours and drive off. However, we’ve always been very successful at removing the paint from our cars as shown below.
What You’ll Need
- Polish or cutting compound
- Shampoo, detail spray or waterless car wash
- Microfibre cloth
- Wax (optional)
How To Remove Paint From A Car
1. Assess The Damage
To begin, we always recommend that you assess the damage to see if it’s actually worth your effort in removing the paint transfer. This is because if the bumper (the most common area for paint transfer) is cracked in anyway, you’ll need a professional body shop to fix it.
However, if the damage to your car is mostly paint transfer (as shown in the image), you’ll be able to remove it relatively easily using the steps below.
2. Wash The Area
To avoid causing any further damage to the area, you’ll want to clean it beforehand. To do this, you have multiple options because you can either wash the entire car with shampoo or spot clean the area.
If you decide to spot clean the area (as we did in the image), we would recommend using either a waterless car wash or a quick detailer. Both are more than suitable for cleaning the area ready for the removal stage.
3. Apply Polish or Compound
Using a car polish or cutting compound of your choice, begin to apply it to the area with the paint transfer. Rather than using a standard applicator, we used a microfibre car cloth to apply it because it did a better job at capturing the dirt. It also meant that we can turn the cloth if the paint residue covered it (which you’ll find it does).
If you are using a car polish that isn’t abrasive, you may want to choose a different polish or use a compound instead. Alternatively, you can opt for a high quality car scratch remover, which will have the same effect.
4. Wipe Clear & Assess The Area
After applying the polish, buff off any residue and assess the area. If you find that there is still paint residue left behind, apply polish/compound again to the area.
5. Finish Up By Applying A Wax
Once you are happy that the paint transfer has been removed from your car, we would highly recommend that you apply a wax to the area. Although optional, it’ll return the shine and create a protective layer upon the area.
Before & After Results
Another example of removing paint transfer is one that we achieved on a silver car and the results can be seen below. As with the above example, this car was hit by another car that drove away without leaving a note.
Apart from a deep scratch at the bottom of the bumper, all of the paint transfer from the other car was removed.
Conclusion
Hopefully our guide on how to remove paint from a car has displayed how easy and straightforward the process is to do. Although at the time, it may be really frustrating, removing the paint transfer yourself can be very rewarding.
If you require further information with regards to removing paint transfer from a car, feel free to get in touch and we will try to provide our assistance where possible.
